We knew from the very start of Andy Burnham’s government that he was going to go big on housing: on his first day in Number 10 he said he would prioritise ending the need for rough sleeping.
So it was no surprise that he spent a large chunk of his first speech as Prime Minister to Labour Party Conference talking about how important housing was to him, and what he would do to fix the housing crisis.
At Generation Rent we talk about homes being the foundations of our lives, so it was encouraging to hear echoes of this in Burnham’s line, “With a good home, everything is possible. Without one, it feels like nothing is.”
He talked about three new policies – making it easier for councils to take over empty homes, for councils to take over homes that landlords are failing to maintain, and for people without the Bank of Mum and Dad to buy a home. We’ve taken a look at what these announcements mean, and what to expect.
Empty Homes
First, councils will be able to seek an Empty Dwelling Management Order once a home has been empty for six months, instead of the current two years, and won’t need to provide as much evidence. They’ll then be able to house renters who are struggling to find a home.
There are 303,000 homes in England that have been empty for more than six months, not including those tied up in probate. While many are being renovated, it is worth finding ways of getting others back into use, and making it easier for councils to do this.
Empty homes shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet because they tend not to be in parts of the country with big homelessness problems. Indeed, many homeless families have already been forced to move vast distances, torn away from their communities by councils that couldn’t find local homes for them. It would be a mistake if this policy led to more cases like that.
One exception is central London, where there is most need for homes, and there appears to be a problem with investors buying flats and leaving them empty. Between 1.7% and 2.3% of homes in the City, Kensington & Chelsea, Westminster and Camden are long term empty (a larger share are registered separately as second homes) which is a higher rate than England as a whole (1.2%). But even then we’re talking about 6,520 homes, and 47,000 homes in London as a whole – the annual housebuilding target for the capital is 88,000, so bringing any of these empty homes back into use can only be a small part of the solution.
Unsafe Homes
The second announcement is the highlight for us. Homes should not make their occupiers ill, and landlords should not be profiting from them, whether their tenants pay rent out of their pay packets or their benefits. Private tenancies are expensive – there is no justification for them to be poor quality.
The Renters Rights Act has beefed up councils’ enforcement powers and landlords can face large fines for letting out unsafe homes. Councils can already go a step further, with powers to take over properties, including Interim Management Orders and Compulsory Purchase Orders – but these haven’t been used very often.
Burnham said that if landlords with “the worst quality homes” refuse to improve them after warnings, “we will make it much easier for councils to acquire those homes and we will legislate if necessary.”
One concern about fines is that many landlords won’t have the cash to pay them – the National Residential Landlords Association found that councils collected just a quarter of fines between 2023 and 2025. And one concern about compulsory purchase is that councils don’t have the funds to buy homes. For this policy to work, we think councils could play one challenge off against the other: landlords who don’t pay fines build up a debt to the council which can eventually be repaid via a compulsory purchase with the price discounted by the value of the debt.
The tenant would stay put or be temporarily housed while the council makes the improvements the landlord didn’t do. It may be necessary to allow councils to borrow against the value of these properties in order to do the work.
As the Prime Minister doesn’t know if a new law is needed, it sounds like the detail still needs to be figured out.
Your First Home
Finally, the government is reviving the old Help to Buy policy as a Labour-branded Your First Home. The idea is you’ll put down a deposit of at least 2.5%, the government will lend you an equity loan of 20% (which is initially interest-free and grows or shrinks in proportion to the value of your home), and the bank will lend you the rest, but at a better interest rate than if you were borrowing 97.5% of the property’s value.
This is a controversial move: Help to Buy’s biggest success was enriching large developers, and a recent evaluation found that half of beneficiaries would have been able to buy anyway, and it was worse than useless in the least affordable parts of the country, pushing up house prices in London.
But it did help to boost housebuilding a bit and right now building rates are woeful: interest rates have been pushed up even higher by the Strait of Hormuz crisis, which means people who want to buy a home can’t borrow as much, which means builders can’t make the profits they want – so they have slowed down construction. This policy could nudge them to start laying bricks again.
It is also true that, for a lot of renters around the country, it would be cheaper to pay a mortgage on a similar home to the one they’re currently renting, but the cost of rent is hampering their ability to raise a deposit to secure that mortgage in the first place. This policy could solve unaffordable rents for those people by helping them escape renting entirely.
Burnham’s version of Help to Buy has several differences from the Cameron-era one: there will be caps on the household income you need to be eligible, how much deposit you can put down, and the price of the property you buy. This means that government support will be less likely to flow to richer households, and possibly less likely to push up prices for future first-time buyers. The Resolution Foundation came up with a proposal uncannily along these lines – we’ll have to wait for the Budget on 28 October to see how closely the details match, and where the government will find the money for it.
The other difference with the 2010s version is the combination of much higher interest rates and a smaller deposit, which means the risk of negative equity is higher, so buyers could find themselves trapped in a home they can’t easily sell if their circumstances change. We’ve already heard concerns from renters that this could be another scandal on a par with student loans.
Finally, even if the policy is a winner for renters in large swathes of the country, it still feels unlikely to make a difference for those of us living where home ownership is furthest out of reach, particularly London and wider south England. Burnham still needs to find an answer to unaffordable rents.
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